Insurers have been told the threat of strikes riots and civil commotion (SRCC) in the UK can no longer we be considered a background threat.

The warning comes as the increase in protests across the country has seen police and rival protesters clash and ongoing issues such as the year-long strike by refuse workers in the country’s second largest city, Birmingham, shows little sign of resolution.

Risk assessment provider  Synthetik Insurance Technologies (Synthetik), has produced a report on the state of civil unrest in the UK which found the rise in unrest creates the threat of significant SRCC risks for underwriters.

The report takes the form of four trigger-based vignettes or modelled scenarios, each set out with the intention of informing underwriting, claims readiness and continuity planning over the next 12-24 months.

The analysis examines four scenarios around potential threats and loss.

The modelled scenarios are based on protests surrounding asylum hotels in England in 2025 and represent four distinct risks that are shaping UK SRCC exposure: local flashpoints, policing legitimacy, overseas conflict and domestic mobilisation, macro-financial stress.

The report identifies three key issues for carriers and brokers to be aware of:

• Losses scale non-linearly when unrest routes converge near dense retail, police, and transit hubs. Routes and corridor exposure are therefore critical to understanding worst-case loss outcomes.
• Duration of events is as significant as severity, supporting the need for event definition discipline and temporal aggregation awareness in SRCC underwriting.
• Regional towns represent a layer of accumulation, particularly in commuter belts.

Then report warned that insurers need to understand the threat and to do so need to have a more granular view of the risks in venues across the UK.

“UK SRCC is no longer a diffuse background and peril it expresses as a route based accumulation risk whose probability duration and severity vary by catalyst,” It added. “For carriers and syndicates that means pricing accumulation control and sensitivity hinge where crowds move, which nodes they touch and how long disruption persists. A generic outcome will miss the clustering which drive tail outcomes.

The report details the potential for SRCC losses to spread across the UK, with some scenarios seeing losses exceeding £4 billion. It cites a surge in protest volumes, stretching policing, transport and retail security, and the probability that marches tip into opportunistic disorder as structural and behavioural factors that allow incidents to rapidly scale and evolve into multi-hub disturbances.

Tim Brewer, Synthetik COO, commented: “SRCC in the UK has evolved from a background peril into a route-based accumulation risk that is critical to monitor accurately. The severity and spread of loss depend on how civil unrest manifests across spaces, creating concentrations of exposure that may not be visible in more generalised approaches (e.g., concentric rings). For underwriters and brokers, this represents a significant change in how risk is priced, monitored, and accumulated across portfolios.”